Annie Leonard is back with another engaging and frightening look at how our disposable electronics are trashing the earth. The concept is that our favorite gadgets are “designed for the dump,” because they’re “hard to upgrade, easy to break, and impracticable to repair.” For instance, her DVD player broke and the fix-it guy wanted $50 just to look at it. Why bother when you can get a new one at Target for $39? Something about this system has got to change.
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Buy new vs. repair comes down to economics and economic choices. Depending on the situation you choose either or. This is an individual choice. Do we really want government trying to fix this? You may as well make a movie about individual greed, because it’s that individual of a choice. You can no sooner “correct” the buy new vs. repair choice as you could any other individual choice.
Of course if the Fed continues to print dollars, soon we’ll be like Cuba, where we can’t afford to buy new anymore. But Greenies would love that. I would hope a website called “The Consumerist” would loathe a world where Americans can no longer consume. Not to mention the environmental cost of repair. Given the quality of tradespeople we have today, repair isn’t much of an option.
I pondered this all today as I cleaned out my old dishwasher’s impossible-to-change filter, and as my wife ordered our new (and environmentally better) Bosch, which has an easy-to-change filter. Repair the 13-year-old GE washer, complete with its noise, exposed metal heating coil, broken rusty tines, and nasty filter? No. Effing. Way.
The printer companies are the worst offenders of this. They sell the actual printers for dirt cheap, but the ink used in the printers cost as much – or more than, the printer itself. It’s at the point where if you run out of ink – buy a new printer!. The old one is trashed….all due to the fact that the INK is so expensive and that it is often cheaper, or on par, to getting a new printer WITH ink rather then JUST ink.
I don’t think this will change until the law forces it. I don’t want to see the government take control of more things, but sometimes – it’s necessary.
my company does this. We use dell laserjet printers. A new toner cartridge costs 99 dollars per color. We can buy a printer with all four cartridges for 200. So, we have a bunch of these printers to just take the toner out of.
I know that in a lot of cases new printers only come with partially full cartridges. Perhaps your company should look into whether they’re really getting the bargain they think they are.
I agree! I don’t want a DVD player for $39. I want a DVD player for $390!
An abacus is only a “green computer” if it is made from pine or some other quick-growing tree and contains no metal or other non-renewable resource. If it contains metal rods, then it is not a “green computer”. Granted, you’d need to use non-renewable resources (metal) to produce the tools to turn a tree into an abacus, but as long as you use your whetstone to sharpen your blades, you can chop down a tree and then whittle it (literally) down to size.
Of course, I’m sure NONE of the people involved in this project have any devices produced in the last few years. I’m sure ALL of them are still using their IBM XTs and Macintosh 128k computers. After all, to upgrade to something newer would be a violation of their principles.
Even if DVD players are made with modular parts, the repair man is still going to charge $50 to even look at it because they have fixed costs to pay for, in addition to time and material. But since, thanks to Annie, DVD players cost $390, the repair man may be able to charge more than $50 since the cost to repair will be less than the cost to replace.
I solve the “dump” problem by throwing my electronics and other debris in the river when ithe stuff breaks.
at my old college, we just shoved all our E-waste into a “computer graveyard” in the attic and forgot about it. i brought some stuff up there, and found a box of those 5″ floppies.
catskyfire is wright. In communist countries every product was made to lust us much it can and there is service for every product that was made but that was not profitable so us we know the communism collapsed. I am from post communist county and a have television set that is in color and 25 years and it still have excellent picture. I both new samsung (3 years old) and he has defects in the first year but we manage to repair. Electronics products must be made in mater that the repairing them is cheaper then buying new one. they must lust longer and to be upgradable an of course toxic free an recyclable.
As long as throwing things ‘away’ is cheap/free, the taxpayers are subsidizing the crap-makers, and the people who buy lots of crap. I’d love to see it become pay-as-you-go, and charge for disposal of electronic and consumer goods goods up front. But it is a form of taxation, and unlikely to happen.
I very much like this and will look more into it, but there is 1 flaw that I see in her plan.
Reason we use these toxic materials is because they are some of the best materials we have found for either conducing electricity or insulating heat. In general the more powerful computers out there have also been filled to the brim with this stuff because that is how they got their to be so strong. Whenever you see a computer that says it is “easier to recycle” and compare it to others on the market, it usually pales in most all of the benchmarks and we are unsure if they last as long or longer.